3 things that went wrong on the July 11 episode of WWE Raw

A week removed from a surprisingly solid July 4 edition of WWE Raw, the company’s flagship show continued to build toward SummerSlam with this week’s broadcast from San Antonio, as evidenced by Brock Lesnar’s appearance at the start of the show.

Match-wise, WWE bookended this episode with a pair of quality matches. Unfortunately, it sandwiched plenty of questionable booking decisions between those good matches, contributing to a largely unpleasant three-hour viewing experience.

Three things that went wrong on the July 11 episode of WWE Raw.

Carmella defeats Bianca Belair via countout

Even though she lost clean to Raw Women’s Champion Bianca Belair at Money in the Bank, Carmella received another shot at Belair with the title on the line on this week’s Raw. Color commentator Byron Saxton explained that Belair offered to defend her belt against the former SmackDown Women’s Champion as a means to exact revenge for Carmella attacking her after their match at Money in the Bank.

The rematch went four minutes longer than the one at the pay-per-view. Consequently, this felt like a time-filler match, as no one outside of Carmella’s most ardent supporter believed that she could win the title (and even that might be stretching it), as heard with the muted reactions to most of ‘Mella’s nearfalls.

If Belair had beaten Carmella again, we could’ve filed this match away as just another in a thick folder of pointless-but-harmless Raw matches. Unfortunately, WWE had other plans.

Instead of booking a clean finish, WWE scripted Belair to lose via countout after Becky Lynch — who sat at ringside throughout the match — distracted Belair before the champ could beat the referee’s 10-count.

As a result, Belair looks like a dork for getting so easily distracted by Lynch, and Carmella — who will likely get another title shot next week — still looks like a chump despite the fluky win, especially after Belair hit her with the K.O.D. after the match anyway. It probably won’t matter in the macro, but this wasn’t a good way to restart the Belair/Lynch feud.

The Miz and Ciampa get disqualified for kicking too much a**

The tag team match that pitted A.J. Styles and Ezekiel against The Miz and Ciampa once again showed how counterproductive WWE’s parity booking is. Workrate-wise, everything went well — as expected in a tag match that featured Styles and Ciampa — but WWE ran into that troublesome conundrum of not wanting anyone in the match to take a pinfall loss.

Rather than not book the match, WWE chose to have Styles and Ezekiel win via disqualification after Ciampa attacked Styles to get Miz out of the Calf Crusher and ignored the referee’s five-count to enact more punishment on the former WWE Champion. In other words, Ciampa and Miz got DQ’ed for kicking too much a**.

Is it that hard to book Styles, Miz, and Ciampa in separate matches to give them wins before they presumably have a tag team match with, sigh, Logan Paul at SummerSlam?

Omos pins Angelo Dawkins

Well, at least WWE didn’t concoct another contrived conclusion for the six-man tag team match between R-Truth, The Street Profits, Omos, and Undisputed WWE Tag Team Champions The Usos. The decision to have Omos pin Angelo Dawkins wasn’t much better.

WWE does know that the Profits are challenging for the tag titles at SummerSlam, right? At the very least, the promotion could’ve booked R-Truth to eat the pin (why else would you put him in this match?). Dawkins and/or Montez Ford should be collecting wins heading into the big title match, not taking unnecessary losses.